Entertainment

Everything You Need to Know About YouTube Buying Twitch

What would YouTube and Google want with a website known for streaming video games?

That's the question on many minds after multiple reports say that the tech giant is in talks to purchase Twitch for a whopping $1 billion. (Both Twitch and YouTube have declined to comment "on rumors and speculation").

What exactly is Twitch?

Twitch is a video platform that allows gamers to share what they are playing live to millions of viewers. The company was spun off of Justin.tv in 2011 by Emmett Shear and Justin Kan. Despite the technical obstacles of streaming live video games at the time — anyone who wanted to stream their games had to have top-notch hardware and a great Internet connection — Twitch grew rapidly, even in its first year.

Do people really want to watch other people play video games?

Yes they do. Twitch has now grown to 45 million monthly active users. It gets more traffic during peak hours than Hulu, Facebook, Valve, Amazon, Pandora, and Tumblr, according to data taken in February. A Twitch's 2013 stats, 58% of its viewers watch 20 hours a week or more. Twitch has an average of 540,000 primetime viewers, beating many cable networks that are popular with a younger demographic such as MTV (465,000 viewers) and SyFy (464,000 viewers).

What games are they watching?

Twitch users' interests are wide and varied, but here are some particularly popular areas.

E-sports — Competitive gaming is in its heyday, and the games driving the biggest tournaments are also some of the biggest draws on Twitch. These include League of Legends, DOTA 2, and Call of Duty. Non-gamers may not have heard of the first two titles, but these free-to-play PC games have millions of online players, and their tournaments draw a lot of eyeballs.

The last League of Legends championship in Los Angeles in October drew 32 million viewers, 8.2 million of them watching concurrently. For comparison, YouTube's biggest streaming moment was when 8 million people watched Felix Baumgardner's space jump the previous year.

Minecraft — Minecraft is one of the world's biggest games, with 50 million downloads across PC, Xbox, PS3 and mobile. So it stands to reason that the game, a giant sandbox of building blocks, would also be one of the most popular on Twitch; it boasts 10,000 broadcasters every day.

Speedrunning — You can watch a seasoned player zip through games as quickly as possible and make it look like an art form.

Creative experiments — Back in February, more than 10,000 people united to play a single game of Pokémon in an event that took almost three weeks to complete. Twitch Plays Pokémon used the streaming services's chat to allow viewers to direct the action as they input commands for the game's main character. The result was both chaotic and fascinating. There are also ongoing interactive streams that blur the line on watching and playing, such as Salty Bet.

Who are the players?

Last month, Twitch said it had a million people broadcasting games on its platform. Those include a broad range of users: those just sharing for their friends, and the few thousand partners Twitch pays a share of the advertising revenue generated on their channels. To become a partner, you need to apply and reach a minimum number of viewers.

Thanks to Twitch's integration into the next-gen Xbox One and PlayStation 4 gaming consoles, many of the technical barriers to sharing games have been lifted. When Twitch streaming launched on Xbox One in March, the console's broadcasters made up 22% of the total within the first week of launch.

How do video game companies feel about Twitch?

Game developers and publishers have quickly adapted to Twitch as a way to interact with fans directly. 2K Games, Minecraft creators Mojang, Epic Games, Sony, League of Legends creator Riot Games, and others have all used the platform to hold community events, stream announcements and show off new game footage.

Twitch has also been adopted by many of the major gaming conferences as a way to stream panels and announcements, including E3, PAX, and Minecraft's annual convention, MineCon.

What would YouTube want with a game-streaming company?

YouTube has played with live video, streaming major news events such as the presidential debates and the Summer Olympics. But the company is fairly late to the user-generated streaming video party, only offering that option to everyone as of December.

Still, YouTube is well aware of how important gamers are. The most-subscribed YouTube channel is PewDiePie, the Swedish gamer who creates humorous videos of himself playing a bizarre slew of games. Several other large gaming channels are not far behind.

How could Twitch benefit?

Twitch CEO Emmett Shear has told Mashable in past interviews that his company's biggest problem is trying to keep up with demand. Delivering high-quality streaming video to millions of viewers across the globe can be a technical struggle. Many of Twitch's recent hires focus solely on that engineering challenge, Shear said. And the problem is only going to get worse as streaming-enabled consoles such as Xbox One take off.

YouTube, with Google behind it, is one of the few companies in the world that could help deliver this kind of scale.

Why are Twitch's users worried?

When the news broke Sunday, the Twitch community had a lot to say about the potential acquisition, and most of it wasn't positive. The hashtag #RIPTwitch began trending on Twitter. Here's what worries users:

Content ID —YouTube has had a long and murky history with copyright claims. While the site has had to clamp down on pirated music, TV and movie content that's ripped and reposted, it has also hurt legitimate uses of remixed content that fall under fair use.

Games videos often fall into this legal grey area. Most of the gaming videos on YouTube use game footage for the purposes of reviewing, guiding other players, or for humor and entertainment. Many game publishers have either turned a blind eye to this growing industry, or have publicly supported YouTube creators, but a few haven't.

The way YouTube's Content ID system works is by siding with the person filing the copy infringement claim immediately without independent investigation. Only after videos, and potentially the whole channel, are taken down can a content creator file an appeal. The concern being that this content ID policy will carry over to Twitch.

Copyrighted Music — Gamers also fear a higher involvement from the litigious recording industry if Twitch is acquired, as using music in the background of streams is very common practice.

Shoehorning Google+ — Google's social network is unavoidable if you want to use YouTube, Hangouts, or other Google-run services, whether you like it or not.

How will this acquisition play out?

That's impossible to say right now. None of the sources reporting on the potential acquisition agree on how far negotiations have progressed. But if it does go ahead, Google is likely to treat Twitch with a light touch. After all, it left YouTube to operate independently after it bought the company for $1.65 billion in 2007, Google+ integration in YouTube comments in 2013 notwithstanding.

With gamers already wary of the search giant, the company will have to step extra carefully if Twitch is going to continue its phenomenal growth.

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